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A pretentious forum on whether Heady is better than Zombie Dust

Tristan:
Classification is a mother fuck. Our desire to name is the manifestation of another deeper, baser desire, one that compels us to sort, rank, and pathologize everything we see. One thing can’t be said to be superior or inferior to another until we separate the two, and since our most primal urge to sort every single thing, we make a great big deal out of description.

Description is judgment; describing something means exerting a mastery over that something. It’s nearly impossible to come up with a coherent, conveyable manner of description that doesn’t fit into an established classification mechanism or schema. Once you’ve accepted this fact, you have three choices: the first is muteness. If you are a human in America in the year 2013, muteness means passive consumption. It also means forgoing your meager avenues of enfranchisement, abdicating the advocacy role that is a prerequisite for freedom of choice.

Option two: become judgey. Assign scores and rankings. Submit the quantified grist of your opinion onto the gods of aggregation and hope that by virtue of making yourself into a node, that you sway others to your opinion in some impossible-to-measure manner. (That, or you could write free form blog-length entries explaining your opinion, but if that’s your means of enfranchisement you might as well go recite a poem to a tree you fucking hippie.)

Third option: rip the system. This is for the advanced. It means you don’t just assign a score or state an opinion. Instead, you change the systems through which scores are assigned or opinions input. You can do this through public deliberation or forums agitation, or take the route of this very blog and translate your thoughts into stammering retard nihilism.

And so now it’s time for us to describe the world’s supposed best beer. Let’s frame it just like that: as in the running for the world’s best beer. Since that designation has been bestowed upon it by American beer geeks in 2013, that means it’s the world’s best hop-forward IPA. Does it hold up to that standard?

Kinda.

It’s excellent in a manner I don’t need to explicate, since everyone else has already done that. It’s not, however, the best beer I’ve ever had, nor even the best recent-vintage IPA. The hop profile is wonderfully vareigated and citrusy, but also gets a bit unpleasantly heavy in the back end. The malt is totally subordinate to the hops–as is customary for this new style of IPA–but in order for this to work the hop profile must balance itself perfectly. Heady’s doesn’t. It comes close, and the beer is still a joy, but it’s not quite perfect.

In sum, very good. Excellent, probably. But Zombie Dust beats it by a mile.